Customer Reviews

Atlantic Cousins: Benjamin Franklin and His Visionary Friends

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This book was one of the most intriguing, intellectually stimulating, and inspiring that I've ever read. Prof. Fruchtman weaves his profound knowledge of history with entertaining stories, historical facts, and details. The result is a genuine page-turner.

You will read this book amazed at how selfless and societal-thinking the great men and women of the 18th century were. They were true visionaries, and it is a way of thinking that we all must try and return to.

The fresh approach of this fine series of short biographies of Benjamin Franklin's international collection of friends and influences is an excellent supplement for anyone who has read a book about Franklin and wants a wider point of view. Last year I read Walter Isaacson's bestselling book on Franklin, but realized that the great man didn't exist in a vacuum and I wanted to read more about some of the diverse circle of great minds around the world who helped shape Franklin's genius. This book provided exactly what I wanted.

I bought this book for a friend. But I truly recommended it more for research and/or undergraduate analysis of Benjamin Franklin's intellectual background philosophy. The book has several in depth examples of his intellectual "cousins" so to say with whom Benjamin Franklin conversed in America, England, and France during the "Age of Enlightenment". Abolitionists - Anthony Benezet of Philadelphia and Granville Sharp of London; British scientists and dissenters of the crown, Joseph Priestly and Richard Price, each of whom challenged Franklin to better understand church and state separation issues; the French Enlightenment genius, Marquis de Condorcet who authored "Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind" and was probably the "greatest French political conceptual thinker and observer; as well as Jean-Paul Marat and Franz Anton Mesmer, each of whom Franklin eventually rejected. This book has a solid perspective of Franklin and defines his American, English, and French contemporaries in a way that shows how those contacts had an interesting influence on the man's (BF) greatest political transformation.